Tag Archives: Christianity

The simple answer is that nothing is wrong with the way in which most people today practise Islam, one of the three best known of the “monotheistic” faiths.

Islam at once appears to be both the youngest and oldest child of the Abrahamic tradition. Ishmael was the elder son of Abraham, Isaac being the younger, but Islam (as defined by Mohammed) developed after the movement that many would describe as the first significant descendant of Judaism, Christianity.

Before I proceed, let me undermine that basic premise by pointing out that the Brahmin tradition of Hinduism and the Taoist tradition of Buddhism can both trace their roots to the influx of Jews into Asia after the Babylonian exile period. In that sense, both Christianity and Islam would be relative late-comers to the Ibrahimin fold. Likewise, the primary faith of the Persians, Zoroastrianism, would also take a sharp turn in a more monotheistic direction with the arrival of the enslaved Israelite tribes following the assumption of Darius’ Median empire by the Persians. Darius had taken up the reins from the Babylonians who had conquered Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar a little earlier in that same 6th century BCE and carted off all those slaves.

There are more examples, but here we can see that the vast majority of the world’s population (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims) have had their cultures shaped by their interaction with the family of Abraham, with about 50% of the world still openly tracing its heritage to that lineage: Christianity (2.2B), Islam (1.4B) and Jews (12-18M).

The problem seems not to be that we don’t have enough in common, but in the interpretation of that common heritage.

When the hadiths talk of the end times and speak of the trees and rocks saying: “Muslim, behind me is a Jew. Come and kill him.”…that is not to say that Muslims are bound to such terrible actions as a matter of faith. Quite the opposite. The hadith is saying that in the time of judgment there will be a persecution of Jews, such that they will have nowhere to hide. We saw this in the last century with the persecution and attempted anihilation of the Jews by the Nazis, as they could find no place to hide. And yet we hear some imams calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews every Friday, citing these hadiths as if they were a licence to kill. Ironically, the Qur’an makes it quite clear that a prerequisite for the fulfillment of its scripture is that the Jews will be returned to the land noted in the Qur’an itself.

Islam is, in many ways, the religion most closely resembling Judaism. The Qur’an features a line-up of prophets that are exclusively Jewish, including Mohammed, who traced his own lineage from Ishmael, son of Abraham, who was circumcised in the skin at Moriah; hence, a Jew.

Like Judaism, Islam is intensely monotheistic, rejecting Jesus as a deity, though, unlike Judaism, it welcomes him as a prophet…and anticipates his return at the end of days, or Qiyaama. All three religions agree that Jesus was a Jew, and Islam and Christianity both agree that he’ll still be a Jew when he returns. Even the Mahdi, it is said, will be a Jew.

So, how is it that radical Islamic preachers can advocate the killing of Jews? What’s wrong with this picture?

Religion has been used for millennia as an actuator for social change. We are seeing the negative side of this in radical Islam today. We saw it, albeit in a more positive light, in Poland when the Roman Church was instrumental in the downfall of the Communist movement in Eastern Europe. We saw it in the spread of Christian “Liberation Theology” in Central America, the correctness of which is still debated within the church. We saw it in the time of Mohammed, and in the time of Jesus. We saw it in every revolt against the Greek and Roman empires in the Middle East.

That religion can be a motivating force in people’s lives should not be an indictment against religion lest we are prepared to also throw away the ancient knowledge that is encoded in those traditions.

It is the interpretation of these ideas, these concepts, these traditions, that needs to be discussed. For it is only in their mutual examination that we can bring about peace without the need for the precursor of looming total destruction.

The trick is not to convert people between faiths, but to help them become better role models within their individual faiths. Just as the rainforests are a seminal trust of biodiversity for this planet, so are the various faiths of man a reservoir for all the aspects of his divine nature.

The roles and significance of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes in Jewish religious history has been much discussed and – more often than not – hotly debated. From whence did these three influential sects arise?

Here’s a brief article on the origin of their respective names.

The Sadducees were the Hasmonean priests of the Second Temple period (516 BCE to 70 CE) in Jerusalem. The name comes from the Hebrew name Tzadok, the high priest who anointed King Solomon and who was selected by the him to oversee the affairs of worship. The name in Hebrew (צדוק) means “righteous”. In the Greek histories, since there is no single Greek letter that makes the sound “tz” (the letter tzadi צ in Hebrew), the word gradually became more Hellenic.

That’s the easy one that everybody knows.The Essenes, whose name we also obtain from the Greeks, is a case of language evolving in the opposite direction. The moniker began as the Greek term xénos (ξένος – stranger) and became incorporated into the local parlance between the time of Alexander’s Middle Eastern campaigns until the Roman occupation of the region. Koine Greek was widely spoken in the area, especially in commercial and cultural centres. Because there is no single letter in Hebrew to represent the sound “x“, a common “s” sound (samech: ס) was substituted with a placeholder vowel (aleph: א) standing at the head of the word – resulting in the Aramaic-Hebrew word Esseni (אסני). Transliterated back into Greek, this resulted in the word Εσσηνοι (Essenoi), as recorded in the histories of Josephus.

Neither Josephus, nor Philo, nor Pliny the Elder recognised how the term came into being; never suspecting that it originally came from Greek! The question would seem to be why the Essenes, a sect of religious ascetics who studied almost exclusively in Hebrew would choose to call themselves by a Greek word. And the short answer is that they didn’t; they were called that by the rest of the population. Often living and studying in caves or other rough shelters, they ventured out only to attend select discussions and ceremonies at the Temple in Jerusalem. No wonder everyone called them ‘strangers’. They lived most of their lives below the radar since the time when the armies of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the Temple of Solomon in 586 BCE, when they fled to the desert regions with as many scrolls as they could carry and sought shelter in caves. Ironically, they also considered themselves Tzadokites (Sadducees) since they were largely descended from the line of Tzadok – unlike the Hasmonean high priests who later came to hold that name themselves.The Pharisees were generally composed of those returning from the Babylonian exile after Cyrus the Great, King of Persia and Media, conqueror of Babylon, granted them leave to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple – as prophesied by the prophets Jeremiah and Daniel. During the time that they were separated from the activities in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, they resurrected the oral traditions to a degree not seen among the Israelites since the time of Moses. They had little choice. They had but fragments of their sacred texts that they were able to smuggle with them into captivity; a situation that eventually led to the creation of the Babylonian Talmud and the development of the Rabbinic tradition. Without an acknowledged central authority, religious instruction quickly devolved into a new, more distributed format. The term Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word פרושים (perushim), meaning ‘separated ones’.

Upon their return to Jerusalem and environs (having lived for almost 50 years in exile under a combination of Babylonian, Median and Persian rulers) they found that they didn’t immediately fit in. The Sadducees initially rejected their new teaching methods and the mostly Aramaic-speaking population wasn’t quite sure what to do with so many now-Farsi-speaking immigrants. This makes a double entendre of the name, since it can refer to their time of ‘separation’ and to the language (Parsi/Pharsi/Farsi) that they predominantly spoke.

In the end, it would take the efforts of all three sects to keep their common faith alive through many years of repression and persecution by Rome; the period during which the Second Holy Temple would be defiled and destroyed.